A few weeks ago, the European Union’s Europol made over 25 arrests during a crackdown on AI-generated Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM). The operation which spanned 35 countries led to 70 arrests, the rescue of 39 children, and the seizure of devices.
The main accused, a Danish national, ran an online platform which allowed users access to AI-generated content depicting child abuse, after making a “symbolic online payment.”
This is the brute reality of child sexual abuse in the digital era, a state-of-the-art borderless crime, amplified by anonymity, which is difficult to detect using traditional frameworks. AI-generated abusive content like deep-fake manipulation, chat-bots and other emerging forms like self-generated content, live-streaming of CSAM, online grooming, and Webcam Child Sex Tourism (WCST) are on the rise. Even though the artificially created content has no real victims, it raises serious concerns about the human tendency to derive gratification from simulated suffering inflicted upon children, eventually triggering demand for such content everywhere.
A Legal Turning Point: From Moral Denial to Legal Recognition
India accomplished a breakthrough in its legal journey on September 23, 2024, when the Supreme Court delivered a landmark Judgment in Just Rights for Children Alliance v. S Harish, addressing the legal governance and criminalisation of “CSEAM- Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse Material”, earlier known as “Child Pornography”.
The case arose from a Madras High Court judgment that quashed the criminal proceedings against an accused found in possession of CSEAM. It held that mere possession/storage or viewing of such material without an intent to transmit does not constitute an offence under the Information Technology Act, 2000 or Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (POCSO Act).
The Supreme Court not only overturned the High Court’s order of terming possession, storage and watching of CSEAM in private as a matter of “mere moral decay” but also criminalised the downloading, viewing, possession, and storage thereof, whether shared or not.The court also issued a sweeping set of directions, marking a watershed moment in India’s jurisprudence on digital child protection. These directions inter-alia mandated legislative reforms by way of replacing the term “Child Pornography” with CSEAM to also cover the generative nature of content. “Child pornography” is misleading and trivialises the severity of the crime, as it implies consensual adult content while ‘CSEAM’ accurately reflects the exploitative nature of these materials, including AI-generated depictions.
Statistics and Trends: Scale of the Problem
The judgment comes amidst an alarming surge in incidents in India. The National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), USA, in its tip-line report 2023, reveals that India accounts for around 9 million of the 36.2 million suspected CSEAM reports worldwide.
A 2023 report, Entangled in the Web: Cybercrimes against Children in India by India Child Protection, stated that there was a five-fold increase in such cases from less than 3% in 2017 to 15% in 2021 in the country. Meanwhile, NCRB data revealed a staggering 2,561% increase in reported child pornography cases from 44 in 2018 to 1,171 in 2022.
Recognising the gravity of such cybercrimes, the Government of India implemented the Cyber Crime Prevention against Women and Children Scheme under Nirbhaya Fund. Moreover, a MoU has been signed between NCRB India, MHA and NCMEC for facilitating the tip-line reports on online child sexual explicit contents.
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